The ‘me’ is funny, but citing Vermeule kicks it up a level. He’s been howling that the law means nothing, all that matters is his novel theory that Ancient Roman social practice towards adopted children means, through some unexplained analogical mechanism, nobody can become a naturalised citizen

April 10, 2026 - 06:55 UTC

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Here’s an example: all naturalised citizens are inherently inferior to birthright citizens, second-class ‘citizens’, and their citizenship is forever contingent, because they could speak out against the pater familias, and this speech-act, in-itself, is to de-naturalise/de-adopt yourself
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not even an accurate account of literal adopted children
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The Romans! Famous for adopting people, even grown men, and affording them full legal and political rights as blood relatives!
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"How can we revive the ancient belief in natural slavery?"
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Barnett! Epstein! Hamburger!

Sorry but this is a bad attempt to Keyser Soze us.
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Of course he cites Vermeule, the guy who made the case for America's global torture campaign during the Iraq war.
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I have zero intention of ever reading a single word by Vermeule. But I’m chuckling to learn that he draws on Roman practices around adopted children. When Dicey, in his foundational Victorian text on the English constitution, talks about how icky he finds an idea of legal gender recognition, he
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cites an 18th-century Italian living in England, who commented on how this was a weird hangup that English lawyers have generally. And then this eighteenth-century Italian points out that Roman adoption practices pointed towards the law doing a bit of gender swapping had been fine for the Romans.
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